Point-of-purchase advertising systems are common in the retail environment, see U.S. Patent Application No. 20030115096. Point-of-purchase advertising encourages consumers to purchase products.
Many products in the retail environment are identified and tracked using radio frequency identification (RFID) tags. The tags can encode uniform product codes (UPC), or electronic product codes (EPC). In most prior art systems, the tags are primarily used for inventory control and checkout.
U.S. Pat. No. 6,659,344 describes a system for monitoring automatically the movement of products equipped with RFID tags. The systems monitors when and where the products move by placing RFID readers on shelves, shopping baskets, racks, and check-out counters.
U.S. Pat. No. 6,507,279 describes a retail checkout system that incorporates access control, electronic article surveillance, and a RFID subsystem to direct advertising at individual consumers according to their buying habits. The consumers use either a cellular telephone or an interactive personal digital assistant to interact with the system.
U.S. Pat. No. 6,843,415 describes a monitoring system that detects RFID events as products are placed on shelves or removed from the shelves to maintain an inventory.
U.S. Patent Application 20030132298 describes a portable shopping system, and an improved order selection and fulfillment system that uses portable terminals, telephony, and the Internet. The terminals can be used to locate products, and to display product information and advertising.
U.S. Patent Application 20050003839 describes a system that collects data about consumer products and services using handheld RFID devices with a display to enable electronic commerce.
U.S. Patent Application 20040254837 describes a consumer marketing research system. Video monitors with RFID card readers are located in a retail store to provide advertisements to the consumers based on a profile of the consumer stored on a card carried by the consumer.
U.S. Patent Application 20040044564 describes a real-time retail display system in which advertising displays are updated interactively based on current behavior and demographic information of consumers and historical trends.
It is desired to provide a retail marketing system and method that can monitor and influence consumer product selections without explicit consumer identification. The system should be accurate, and work in real-time.